When I started at HarperCollins, I didn't know what to expect, from the books, from the job, from anything! I had dozens of backlist titles to read and those first few weeks are still a bit of a blur.

One of those books was Jacquelyn Mitchard's THE BREAKDOWN LANE. I remember picking it up, starting to read, and everything around me stopping; the craziness, the million other stories that were careening around in my head. They all stopped. And the voice of Jackie Mitchard's narrator, Julianne Ambrose Gillis, is all I heard.

Julianne is an advice columnist for her small town Wisconsin newspaper. But she's the one who needs the advice when her husband of twenty years decides to leave both her and their family. His decision is completely out of the blue and there seems to be no rhyme or reason to his departure.

After he leaves, Julianne is diagnosed with a serious illness. Their kids go looking for their father and...well, what they find isn't what they expected. That, for me, was what I took away from the novel. Nothing is ever going to be like we expect. We just kind of have to roll with the punches.

There's something about the way Jackie writes. I think it's an inherent authenticity in her characters, in her dialogue that really resonates with me. She creates these fully formed, well, lives that make you feel as though you're peeking through the window shades of your next door neighbor. (But without the guilt!) You have these regular people to whom terrible and wonderful things happen. You can't help but truly empathize with these fictional characters as if they were real people you'd known for years.

I made it through the first awkward few months. I've been at Harper for three years now and I've read more books than I could count. But THE BREAKDOWN LANE really sticks with me, more like a memory than a book.

Discovering new authors and great books is one of the (many) highlights of working in editorial. I really found my niche, but being an editorial assistant is one hard job to learn. Totally worth it but you have days where nothing seems to go right and it feels like you'll never get the hang of it.

Have any of you ever started a job where you knew it was what you wanted to do but the sheer volume of work was almost overwhelming enough to make you change your mind? What did you do to get through it? For me, it was all worth it in the end. Was it for you?